An amazing epic, from the great Robert A Heinlein.

Full of wit, wisdom, and insights into the writer, as seen through the eyes of Lazarus Long. A sprawling, masterly science fiction epic, that ranks among the best ever written.

A must-read for any science fiction fan.

Time Enough for Love...I pulled many quotes from Time Enough for Love. Imagine living not quite forever and for all intents and purposes forever. Imagine the knowledge and wisdom one would accumulate by doing nothing else but paying attention. You don't have to participate (although how could you avoid it?) and you'd still gather so much via observations from preparations to outcome, even if the entire sequence took many lifetimes (anthropologists take note. Wouldn't it be grand to create a blind and do just that? Astronomers/Cosmologists/Cosmogonists take note. Isn't that what we're doing on our lonely planet's journey through the Universe?).

People seem to have a love it or hate it kind of relationship with Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love. And I’ve gotta say I’m strapped firmly to the former bandwagon. Granted, I can see why some of the negative Nancy’s are getting their panties in a knot (okay, maybe the incest theme goes a little far), but Heinlein’s weirdness just doesn’t bug me. And I think some critics have missed the mark entirely, by focusing on the wrong stuff. Which is fully within their rights, of course, and an opinion is only an opinion. Blah blah blah. Here’s my two cents on why they’re wrong:

Time Enough for Love is set up as a series of tales told by the oldest living man in the universe, Lazarus Long. Lazarus is confined to a rejuvenation clinic, where he is being held against his will by a team of people dedicated to preserving his knowledge. You see, they’ve “rescued” Laz from attempted suicide, in order to record his life’s story and hopefully glean some of the wisdom he’s accumulated in over two-thousand years of life. And Lazarus has agreed not to try to take his own life again, until he’s told them about the most important lessons learned in his long life. Time Enough for Love is like Arabian Nights, but in reverse; Laz is telling his stories for his right to die.

So the structure necessitates a kind of “bracketing” set up, wherein Lazarus’ tales are divided by his present experiences in the rejuvenation clinic. And I’ve got to admit, Lazarus’ voice is where Heinlein’s storytelling excels. I sometimes had to restrain myself from skipping forward until the next story, although, in the end I’m glad that I did (restrain myself, that is). Heinlein brings everything together nicely once Lazarus regains an interest in life and goes on to set up his free-lovin’ hippie commune on the planet Boondock, and all of a sudden his present becomes the next tale.

The number one complaint that I’ve noticed in other reviews is with Heinlein’s apparent preoccupation with incest. But I think that, unusual as the theme is in modern writing, it has a place in the story and is essential to Lazarus’ character. First and foremost is the fact that Lazarus Long is completely obsessed with genetic purity. As one of the first “long-lifers” on Earth, he was contractually obligated to reproduce only with other long-lifers in order to preserve the longevity they had acquired. Then, there is the fact that old Laz, being nearly three-thousand years old, is the great-to-the-nth-degree grandfather of nearly everyone in the universe, so the older he gets the harder it is for him to find partners with whom he is genetically compatible (not being related to them is virtually impossible).

Lazarus comes to view the appropriateness of sexual pairings solely through the lens of healthy reproduction—and then, only if reproduction is the goal (in the most extreme example Lazarus travels back in time and accidentally falls in love with his mother, an affair that is able to be consummated only because his mother is already pregnant and therefore won’t become pregnant by Laz). And although the taboo of incest, in the traditional sense, once served a primitive purpose to people who didn’t really understand genetics—the over simplified concept is not applicable in Lazarus’ world. In any case, I really didn’t find any of the questionable relationship in this novel to be creepy, even if I did raise an eyebrow at them initially.

Creepy incestuous relationships aside, the next biggest complaint of this novel that I’ve encountered has to do with Heinlein’s characterization. Really, everyone in the novel except for Lazarus himself, seems to fall into a stereotypical kind of mould. Every male character is interchangeable with every other male character, and the same goes for the female characters, even if they have slightly different physical characteristics. However, I would argue that, perhaps this sameness has more to do with Lazarus’ memory than Heinlein’s skill as a writer. It seemed to me, that people kind of blend together for Lazarus; every character is a mixture of all of the people he has ever known, their personalities and their deeds are not necessarily attributed accurately (Lazarus is a textbook unreliable narrator, and is frequently caught in contradictions and fallacies throughout the book). The secondary characters in Lazarus’ tales are place-holders, used by Lazarus to get his point across to his audience, but not important in their individuality. They are anecdotal.

This sameness, I would also argue, serves to illustrate Heinlein’s vision of human kind. Ultimately, even thousands of years in the future, human beings can be reduced to their basic needs—the same needs that we have had since the beginning of time. First and foremost, is our need for love. Lazarus’ overarching lesson for humanity is that a person’s worth is measured not by the property and wealth that they accumulate, or by the fantastic deeds that they accomplish, but by the quantity and quality of the time that they spend with those they love—family, friends, and lovers.

And that’s a position that I can stand by.

I have a love-hate relationship with Heinlein. Some of his stuff is great. Some of it, like Farnham's Freehold, which I reviewed here, I simply hate. However, I like enough of his work that I seek more. This was a book that took me a long time to get through, but when I got done, it was well worth it. I read it back in 2002. From my journal back then:

>>I found it to be a book that makes you think. I thought the opening was a bit slow, but once the narrative was set up, it got interesting.... I found that reading the book in segments, a part here and a part there, worked better for me.One of my favorite parts was the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, a section of maxims full of common sense. I also enjoyed the tale of Dora very much, a moving tale of how Lazarus fell in love with an ephemeral woman and their life together til death did them part.<<

I also recall the ending for having a nice twist (I am not saying, go read it instead). This is a book about a rascal, a picaro to borrow the Spanish word, which is so much better than just saying "rascal," if nothing else. It integrates different genres. In some ways reminded me of works like One Thousand Nights and a Night and Don Quijote (not the Man of La Mancha's idealism, but the novel's integration of different genres and elements). This has become one of my favorite books.

"Time Enough for Love follows Lazarus Long through a vast and magnificent timescape of centuries and worlds. Heinlein's longest and most ambitious work, it is the story of a man so in love with Life that he refused to stop living it."

I know that a lot of people love Heinlein and I have enjoyed a number of his novels too. This one, however, suffered from the need of editing--it was much too long and repetitious, especially if you have already read Stranger in a Strange Land or Friday. These books make me wonder what kind of person RAH was and what it would have been like for his wife to live with him.

He is a great proponent of being self-reliant--but the farther we get from the horse and plough, the more reliant we become on others to build our devices, be they mobile phones, computers or spaceships. We live in a society where we have to rely on others--I don't know how to make cloth or even how to turn cloth into clothes. Someone else does my farming, gardening and butchering and it will be that way until the replicators show up (and even then I'll be reliant on the replicator repairman!)

RAH also seems to have some odd ideas about what women want (here's a clue, we don't necessarily want umpteen babies!). It seems like Lazarus Long always has some woman hanging onto his leg, begging to be impregnated. That got really old for me after the first time, let alone after the 20th time! Research has proven that when women get educated and have access to birth control, birth rates go down. We prefer to have fewer children and to invest more in those children, rather than produce dozens, and I'm sure women of the future, no matter how long they live, will continue to feel that way.

Basically, I was irritated with the women characters for the duration of the book--they are not like any women that I know. In the end, I think they say much more about Heinlein that they do about humanity or our future.

Currently listening to it. It's LONG, no pun intended:-) but a perfect read for when I have to cut the dog's hair, or spend an afternoon cooking. Excellent in its scope and historical length.

UPDATE june 2014: came across the audiobook again, and started thinking about all the sexual relationships in this book, and realized that this book come across more so as a sexually freeing journal than a scifi book. It's sex sex sex sex sex, with a little politics and propagation of the genetical code of the longest living human, and just a tiny bit of scifi. Yes, there's living on other planets, yes, there's interstellar ships and A.I.s and time travel, and genetic manipulations, and rejuvenation tech, yes, but most of all there's SEX and intimacy. The book is GREAT, overall, but you can tell that it was written at the peak of the sexual liberation movement. So I say enjoy!


SPOILER: the fact that he'd always wanted a partner like his mother, and that he eventually ends up with his mother, oh my good lord, really? I'm no Freud or a sexually repressed girl, but this is a bit f**ked up in my humble opinion.

Gah! Couldn't finish it. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Boring, boring, boring. Lame, lame, lame.

As far as I can remember, this book (like much of Heinlein) was a real stinker -- and certainly qualifies for "worst title in Science Fiction history." That said, the reason I still give it three stars is that it included one short paragraph which for some reason has stayed with me for over 40 years, and which I hope has informed my life ever since:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

4.49/5

While not my favorite (it is near the top!), this is the Heinlein book that changed my way of thinking, my philosophies and my life. This is the book that made me realize that Heinlein is the non-didactic version of Ayn Rand.

Edit - just read it again. Story-wise, it wasn't as enjoyable a read as the first time I read it. The messages and lessons are still valid, but not as well executed as I once thought.

All right, another rating biased by the age at which I read this book. I read Time Enough for Love in what was then the Soviet Union over the course of a white night. I'm not kidding.

At any rate, Time Enough for Love is a decent enough story and entertaining. Par for the course with Heinlein, though, is negotiating his complicated relationship to gender and his often overblown moralising. This is not to say that these issues are wholly negative; Heinlein's relationship to gender and morality is more or less a caricatured libertarianism but, like libertarianism, is often theoretically interesting.

I still enjoy the book on rereading but it may be difficult for a first time adult reader. As I've mentioned in other reviews, the use of early 20th century Americana always draws me in; there's something mesmerizing about the exaggerated wholesomeness of the time contrasted with its twisted provincialism, although I can't put a finger on what exactly that something is.

Like Lazarus himself, this book is very LONG. The audiobook was enjoyable ... the narrator certainly had enough voices in his bag of tricks to handle the numerous characters that were in the mix.

Because it was such a LONG book there were plenty of spots that were boring as heck ... it made me chuckle every time the actual text said "Seven Thousand Words Omitted" (or whatever number) because I'd exclaim to my husband "why didn't he omit that other part about the blah blah blah?" Still, there were also plenty of parts that were amusing and entertaining as heck as well, and made it worthwhile to stick around. I'd say the last quarter of the book was the best part.